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My name is Joshua Braun, and for those who don’t know me, I was one of the founders of Hortipharm, and the executive director of the collective when it was raided. Last week I was released from Santa Barbara County Jail after six days of incarceration stemming from these raids. It has been an interesting couple of weeks, to say the least, but I want you all to know that I am in good spirits, and absolutely confident in my defense. I hope I can say the same for my co-defendants. To my co-defendants: I love all you guys, and I will do what it takes to see to it you don’t pay for mistakes you did not make!

By Paul Wellman (file)

Josh Braun (left)

During my stay with the county I was able to squeeze a few moments into my busy schedule there to think of how something like this could happen, after all the extraordinary steps we went through as an organization to ensure the highest level of integrity and transparency for our patients, for my co-workers, and for the community at large. As this is an ongoing investigation, I will not speculate publicly as to the answer to this question. All I will say is that if more could have been done to ensure compliance, it would have been done.

We set out to create a model dispensary. Despite recent events, I humbly hold my head high, as I consider the work put in by our Horti team a complete success in this regard. It pains me greatly to see the public humiliation and criminal charges that have been put on my co-workers, who dutifully carried out their jobs with the utmost integrity. Equally so, it devastates me to see what they did to my innocent wife, Dayli, who is not involved at all with the collective. Her strength over the past week was inspirational.

A bail hearing was set for Monday, June 20, to reduce the excessive bail set for us. However, an unfortunate “mistake” that sent us to the Santa Maria Courthouse instead of the Santa Barbara Courthouse, coupled with a court furlough on Wednesday, kept society safe from us until late Thursday evening, when our $1,000,000 bail was reduced to release on our own recognizance. I have yet to be informed as to why a charge with a bail schedule of $20,000-$60,000 reached such astounding heights, or how, specifically, we were “outside the scope of the Compassionate Use Act.” Over time details will emerge.

The case against all employees and volunteers of Hortipharm will be vigorously defended.

Regarding the allegations of money laundering through Pizza Guru, there is simply no truth to them. The prosecutor has informed me through my counsel that they have developed evidence that Pizza Guru was “not an ongoing concern,” but rather a shell through which we would route skimmed funds from Hortipharm. All one needs to do to learn that this is patently false is to go sit at Guru for an hour from 7-8 p.m. or so. The lines speak for themselves: Guru’s fresh, local, and organic ingredients, along with our sustainable business practices and vegan and gluten-free specialties have helped to raise the bar for pizza in Santa Barbara. I am proud of my wife, and her involvement in this hot mess is unconscionable. For her, Pizza Guru is a mission to provide better diet alternatives to those who care how they feed their body.

I regret to inform our patients that one of the conditions of our release was that Hortipharm is not to reopen until the outcome of the trial. That stipulation, coupled with the new storefront collective ordinance, effectively marks the end of Hortipharm. Thank you all for your loyal support over the past five years, and I hope that our displaced patients find a new collective that you are happy to be part of.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, come give Pizza Guru a try. Though our bodies are innocent until proven guilty, our finances are not. Law enforcement has frozen each and every personal and business account we hold, and we can use the support of our community to help rebuild what they have unnecessarily crushed, and to pay for the defense we will require to see this through to the end.

Any patients who would be interested in supporting us at trial through letters or testimony can email me at 3domfighter@cox.net. Even opponents of the Compassionate Use Act can feel free to email me your questions, concerns, comments or complaints. I’d love to hear from all of you, and I will miss the amazing things we did together as an organization over the past five years.

So this was a zoning enforcement action by the police; to retroactively put this particular 5 year business out of business? A preemptive attack; to prevent this business owner's legal challenge of our conservative council's restrictive storefront ordinance. A way for the police to circumvent the voters will; to skirt measure P? The money laundering charges was a ruse developed by the police to get around Measure P? Boycott Boy is correct? We are in a police state? Fascinating.

TEFKAA, thanks for the clarification. All this dispensary mumbo jumbo is so hypocritical. It's an indication of how lost our city officials have become. We will just have to wait for the money trail to unfold, it's always about "the money."

So answer me this, if your neighborhood was once zoned for only one story houses and the zoning was changed to allow two story houses, then changed back to one story, do the homeowners have to remove their second story or lose their house to the city?

lordleadbetter: you raise a valid question. I don't know much about zoning to be honest, but it seems logical to say that the homeowners with second stories should be allowed to remain and that no new permits for second story additions would be allowed. This is a pretty straightforward situation though, as second stories on homes don't usually bring up emotionally charged issues like drug use among teens or neighborhood crime. So, it's difficult for me to compare your example with the dispensary issue in SB.

"As this is an ongoing investigation, I will not speculate publicly as to the answer to this question."

What are you guys doing the investigation? Nice line there kiddo, but you are not restricted from telling us what is going on, you are only handicapped by not admitting your guilt. All your letter is is filled with fluff. I'm pretty sure you goose is cooked. Sounds like you have an excuse for everything, but I would venture a guess that the with the current state of public ideology that the cops wouldn't do this big investigation unless they got their ducks in a row. Be thankfully that they didn't go after you federally.

Josh, Dayli & Gustavo all had a million dollar bail and were all released on "OR" (their own recognizance). Meaning the city is confident they can be trusted to appear for their hearing.These are long term trustworthy members of the community that have overwhelming support both in business and personally. If the city was that confident in their prosecution they wouldn't have been released without at a minimum, being required to post bail.

but still InTheKnow...the bail was drastically reduced perhaps because a duck or two strayed? You have suggested "guilt." EZK, and others would just like to Know what you Know. Since you seem certain. Otherwise you're just speculating like the rest of us.

I am all for outright legalization of marijuana, though I do not engage in mind-altering substances of any type except newspapers, television, & the ubiquitous innernetz. Which is why I am so apparently dainbramaged.

Nevertheless, perhaps I am way offbase in thinking that there cannot possibly be that many "patients" in need of pot for their various ailments. I mean how many dispensaries were there in SB allegedly "serving their patients?"

C'mon---any rational person has long raised eyebrow at the wink-wink euphemism in the assignation of the term "patient."Let's call them what most of them are: potheads who bump an elbow, invent a phantom ailment, get a doctor's note, and get to legally buy and possess the good ganj.

An old Chinese proverb states: The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their true names.

Draxor, that is patently false. The truth is that cannabis helps hundreds of ailments which can make living life more easy for patients. Whether it is pain management, sleep, depression, stress or some other ailment that causes nausea or any other sort of discomfort cannabis can provide safe, therapeutic relief. It helps people eat, sleep and basically live their life. Who are you to tell someone that cannabis doesn't help them get a good night's rest so that they can go to work or school or live their life feeling more energized and able? I just finished a 2 year graduate program while working full time. I received a 4.0 GPA and I never would have been able to do that without cannabis. It helped relieve my stress, it helped me sleep. It is my medicine, and it is a medicine for millions of people who you would presume are using the substance recreationaly.

OK, I'm going to do my "broken record" bit and be redundant, but once again....marijuana was legal before 1937. How do the anti-marijuana (re)-legalization people reconcile their fears against this fact?

Here is my answer: our society had social structure, men who didn't walk out on their kids, (of course today many people don't even bother to get married) and kids grew up knowing they would be accountable for their misbehavior.

The drug problem isn't the result of availability, it's the result of a dysfunctional culture supported by people who are too wrapped up in their lives to pay attention long enough to notice what is happening as well as those who in spite of knowing what is happening, refuse to speak up for fear of criticism.

I agree Bill, but as a human culture we are self-deprecating, the human race will choose to alter themselves if given the opputunity. As a society how far do we go? It is a slippery slope because once marijuana is legalized it will never be outlawed, there would be no going back.

InTheKnow: there are different theories as to why pot is illegal, and of course the most talked-about one is that if we legalize it, it will be more easily available. Nonetheless, I will get back to my pre-1937 argument.

Since those who cry out against legalization using the societal/moral argument are conservatives, I would like to point out that those who want to ban guns are liberals, yet both sides fail to make the connection that whether we ban guns, marijuana, or anything else that was legal once upon a few generations ago, we are not addressing WHY these things are suddenly of such concern to us.

Since you are a conservative, I think it's safe to say that you agree with me that our culture has been slipping down the drain as a whole. Whenever we feel the need as a culture to keep passing more and more laws to restrict ourselves from what we can put into our bodies, or to defend ourselves, we can either take the easy way out and move toward a totalitarian state, or look at ourselves (throwing out the liberal/conservative mindsets and replace them with a pragmatic anthropological approach ) and ask ourselves what we were doing differently when things were such that we didn't have all this fear.

In short, the social changes over the last half-century or so have had positive and negative effects. We need to hold onto--and perhaps fine tune the positive ones while being honest with ourselves and see why the negative ones have occured.

America was founded on freedom: not the idea of cops breaking down doors looking for illegal subtances which in this case, are less harmful than alcohol.

This is B.S. HortiPharm is a F'n joke. Shut 'em down. The freaks went to the Independent claiming that they made a million a year or some B.S. a few years ago. How much of a idiotic moronic imbecile could you possibly be? The freaks drive big V-8 SUV's and trucks and could care less about the environment. They sell chemi / hydro garbage pesticide ridden drugs and call it "medicine." I call B.S. Medicine my ass...The freaks put out of business hundreds of people who supported their families for many years in S.B. with their B.S. poison "medicine." They deal with known criminals and felons. They buy things at ridiculously low prices and double and triple the prices making incredible profits. It's people like this that give cannabis and medicine a bad name. Screw the capitalist pigs. Send 'em to prison. I'll pay the prosecution to do it.